Tuesday, May 2, 2017

DeVega, Chauncey. “Historian Timothy Snyder: “It’s pretty much inevitable” that Trump will try to stage a coup and overthrow democracy” ‘Yale historian and author of the new book "On Tyranny" says we may have one year left to save American democracy VIDEO’ (01 May 2017) Salon.

American democracy is in
crisis. The election of Donald Trump feels like a state of emergency made
normal.

Trump has threatened violence
against his political enemies. He has made clear he does not believe in the
norms and traditions of American democracy — unless they serve his interests.
Trump and his advisers consider a free press to be enemies of his regime. Trump
repeatedly lies and has a profoundly estranged relationship with empirical
reality. He uses obvious and naked racism, nativism and bigotry to mobilize his
voters and to disparage entire groups of people such as Latinos and Muslims.

What can the American people do
to resist Donald Trump? What lessons can history teach about the rise of
authoritarianism and fascism and how democracies collapse? Are there ways that
individuals can fight back on a daily basis and in their own personal lives
against the political and cultural forces that gave rise to Trump’s movement?
How long does American democracy have before the poison that Donald Trump and
the Republican Party injected into the country’s body politic becomes lethal?

In an effort to answer these
questions, I recently spoke with Timothy
Snyder, a professor of history at Yale University. He is the award-winning
author of numerous books including the recent “Black
Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning” and “Bloodlands:
Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.” Snyder’s new book, “On
Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” explores how
the American people can fight back against Donald Trump’s incipient authoritarian
regime.

Our
conversation has been edited for length and clarity. A longer version can be
heard on my podcast, available on
Salon’s Featured Audio page.

1.The election of Donald Trump is a crisis for
American democracy. How did this happen?

2.We asked for it by saying that history was over in 1989 [with
the end of the Cold War]. By saying that nothing bad could [ever] happen
again, we were basically inviting something bad to happen.

Our story about how
nothing could [ever] go wrong was a story about how human nature is the free
market and the free market brings democracy, so everything is hunky-dory — and
of course every part of that story is nonsense. The Greeks understood that
democracy is likely to produce oligarchy because if you don’t have some
mechanism to get inequality under control then people with the most money
will likely take full control.

With Trump, one
sees the new variant of this where a candidate can run by saying, “Look, we all
know — wink, wink, nudge, nudge — that this isn’t really a democracy anymore.”
He doesn’t use the words but basically says, “We all know this is really an
oligarchy, so let me be your oligarch.” Although it’s nonsense and of course
he’s a con man and will betray everyone, it makes sense only in this climate of
inequality.

3.In my writing and interviews, I have
consistently referred to Donald Trump as a fascist. I have received a great
deal of resistance to that claim. Do you think this description is correct? If
not, then what language should we use to describe Donald Trump?

4.One of the problems with American discourse is that we just
assume everybody is a friendly democratic parliamentarian pluralist until
proven otherwise. And then even when it’s proven otherwise we don’t have any
vocabulary for it. He’s a “dictator.” He’s an “authoritarian.” He’s “Hitler.”
We just toss these words around.

The pushback that
you are talking about is 95 percent bad. Americans do not want to think that
there is an alternative to what we have. Therefore, as soon as you say
“fascism” or whatever it might be, then the American response is to say “no”
because we lack the categories that allow us to think outside of the box that
we are no longer in.

5.Is this a function of American
exceptionalism?

6.Yes, it is. We made a move towards intellectual
isolationism in a world where no kind of isolationism is possible. The fact that
democracies usually fail is a rule which can’t apply to us. If you examine
American society, there are high points and low points. But there is certainly
nothing which puts us in a different category than other people who have
failed, whether it’s historically or whether it’s now.

I don’t want to
dodge your question about whether Trump is a fascist or not. As I see it, there
are certainly elements of his approach which are fascistic. The straight-on
confrontation with the truth is at the center of the fascist worldview. The
attempt to undo the Enlightenment as a way to undo institutions, that is
fascism.

Whether he realizes
it or not is a different question, but that’s what fascists did. They said,
“Don’t worry about the facts; don’t worry about logic. Think instead in
terms of mystical unities and direct connections between the mystical leader
and the people.” That’s fascism. Whether we see it or not, whether we like it
or not, whether we forget, that is fascism.

Another thing
that’s clearly fascist about Trump were the rallies. The way that he used the
language, the blunt repetitions, the naming of the enemies, the physical
removal of opponents from rallies, that was really, without exaggeration, just
like the 1920s and the 1930s.

And Mr. [Steve] Bannon’s
preoccupation with the 1930s and his kind of wishful reclamation of Italian and
other fascists speaks for itself.

7.How did the news media and others get this so
wrong? Why did they underestimate the threat posed by Donald Trump and his
movement?

8.What we ended up with, from Bill Clinton onward,
is a status quo party and an “undo the system” party, where the Democrats
became the status quo party and the Republicans became the “undo the system”
party. In that constellation it’s very hard to think of change because one
party is in favor of things being the way they are, just slightly better, and
the other party has this big idea of undoing everything, although it’s unclear
what that really means in practice. So no one is actually articulating how you
address the problems of the day, the greatest of which would be inequality.
When neither party is creative, then it’s hard for scholars to get their ideas
into meaningful circulation.

9.Why is Trump not being held accountable for
all of his failures, scandals and incompetence?

10.Mr. Trump is primarily a television personality. As such, he
is judged by that standard. This means that a scandal does not call forth a
response; it calls forth the desire for a bigger scandal. It just whets the
appetite for a bigger scandal because a television serial has to work on that
logic. It’s almost as though he has to produce these outrageous things because
what else would he be doing?